T/TA

Our mission is to assist States, Tribes, and Territories in developing and implementing comprehensive, multi-faceted diligent recruitment programs in order to achieve improved outcomes, including permanency and placement stability for children and youth in foster care. We provide free technical assistance, publications, and other support to help you recruit and retain foster, adoptive, and kinship families.

Our technical assistance can help you recruit a sufficient, diverse pool of foster, adoptive, and kinship parents for the children and youth in your foster care system. We can help you:

Understand your data about the children and youth in foster care and the families you need to recruit

Develop a mix of general, targeted, and child-specific recruitment strategies

Apply lessons learned from Diligent Recruitment grantees to help you improve placement stability and permanency outcomes

Develop strategies to partner with community groups and stakeholders in the communities from which children and youth enter foster care

Develop targeted recruitment and retention strategies to recruit and support specific populations of parents

Develop integrated diligent recruitment and family support strategies to help you develop and sustain a pool of families that can meet the needs of children and youth in foster care

Request Our Training and Technical Assistance

If you are a public agency, you can access our free consulting, training, and technical assistance services by:

Discussing your needs directly with the National Resource Center for Diligent Recruitment at AdoptUSKids, by calling 303-726-0198 or emailing NRCDR@adoptuskids.org

Our Approach to TA

Many child welfare systems struggle to achieve placement stability and permanency for children and youth in foster care. Our technical assistance for States, Tribes, and Territories helps with developing strategies for recruiting and retaining a sufficient pool of foster, adoptive, and kinship families that will make it possible to keep children and youth in stable placements and provide permanency. This work often involves:

Taking an intensive look at the recruitment process from initial contact to licensure or home study to placement

Identifying for which groups of children and youth the agency struggles the most to find stable placements and permanency

Integrating good customer service principles into an agency’s work with families from their initial contact with the agency through to after placement

Developing strategies for strengthening and sustaining an agency’s family engagement, retention, development, and support efforts

Strengthening an agency’s response system to coordinate with its recruitment efforts

Exploring model programs for foster, adoptive, and kinship family engagement, development, and support that would work for the child welfare system

Developing strategies for partnering with community groups and stakeholders in the communities from which children and youth enter foster care to develop effective recruitment and retention strategies

We believe that TA is most effective when it includes building strong relationships, providing tailored approaches and forms of support to meet the needs of each child welfare system, and understanding the context of each child welfare system. Our lead consultants will work with you to develop a tailored approach to helping you address your recruitment and retention needs.

AdoptUSKids is operated by the Adoption Exchange Association and is made possible by grant number 90CQ0003 from the
Children’s Bureau. The contents of this website are solely the responsibility of the Adoption Exchange
Association and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Children’s Bureau, ACYF,
ACF, or HHS. Find out more about us.